Stan “The Man” Musial – Presidential Medal of Honor

by C. Michael Eliasz-Solomon

This jester always eagerly awaits, Fred Hoffman‘s Gen Dobry newsletter every month. As usual I was intrigued by an article. They wrote about Stan Musial and how on February 15, 2011 how President Obama presented him (along with others) the Presidential Medal of Honor. Like moje zona, I keep a database of my ethnicity in my head. This also intrigued me as the MUSIAL (or more likely, MUSIAŁ) name is also found in my grandparents parish and it is found in some abundance in Detroit / Toledo areas. In fact, there is at least one Musial-Eliasz combination from Detroit/Toledo, so I mused, “Was Stan the Man’s family from my ancestral villages?”.

That is the premise of today’s blog. I went to the Wikipedia link above and found out that Stan’s father was Lukasz and that Stan was born in Donora, PA (nestled on the banks of the Monongahela River in South-West corner of PA). Since Stan was born in Donora, PA, then perhaps it was his father who emigrated to the USA. So I went to Ancestry.com and searched their Immigration records for Lukasz. Of course, as most Polish names are, it was misspelled (Musial was correct, but Lukasz was spelled/indexed as Lukacz). Lukasz came from Myslowa and arrived in the US on 30th-January-1910 on the President Grant ship at the age of 16 (implies a birth year about 1894)! He was heading to Donora, PA. I’d say, I found my man. Oh Stan, if you are interested, your grandfather’s name is Piotr. Lukasz’s ship manifest said he was born in Myslowa. Stanczyk did not know the name of Myslowa, so I went to the mapa.szukacz.pl website tried to locate it. It came up with three possibilities in present day Poland and all were spelled Myslow. I did check the excellent reference by Brian Lenius and it did show a Myslowa and indicated its parish was: Podwoloczyska [the ship manifest did indicate Austria-Polish]. So no matter which of the four locales are correct, the MUSIALs were NOT from my ancestral villages.

But if you are related to “Stan the Pan” Musial, then perhaps this is the lead you need to follow up on. Congratulations Stan Musial on your well deserved Medal of Honor.